May 2013

May 15, 2013

On the AutoCAD UX
team, we've been thinking a lot about building trust with our customers.

We've recently
transitioned our software development process from waterfall to Agile. As a
result, we are getting closer to having smaller, working chunks of code that we
can show to customers sooner.

We have designed a
Customer Council program as a way to partner with customers throughout the
development of our key features. AutoCAD has a very broad user base from
nearly every industry. So for each Customer Council, we carefully select people
who have a vested interest in a particular feature area, and invite them to
participate in our development process with us. Through the council,
participants get to preview very early builds of AutoCAD that have partially complete
functionality, revealing the direction we're going. They can try the functionality
out on their own drawings and projects, give feedback, and watch the features
evolve. This gives customers much earlier exposure to the actual implemented
solution. The big win for us is that we can get feedback in time to make really
meaningful changes.

Sample welcome email after joining an AutoCAD Customer Council

Often, with AutoCAD,
you have to wait until everything comes together to get a good
understanding of the experience that a user will have. Unlike a website, in which
interactions are often linear and decoupled, the AutoCAD experience is an
immersive design canvas with complex, highly-precise interactions, relying on a
sophisticated graphics system. If performance is slow or the code isn't stable,
it will drastically interfere with our users’ experience and we will lose the
sense of how they would really behave. For example, with slow performance, you
see cognitive step-down effects that cause users to lose their concentration
and shift focus. In cognitively demanding tasks like design, this breaks our
users' flow and dramatically changes how they work.

We've noticed that
sharing these early bits of code with customers is like exposing your soft
underbelly. You know the code isn't rock-solid, and there will be bugs and
quirks and probably crashes. You can't hide the buggy areas with a
well-practiced demo, or a controlled usability session. You are releasing the
code over to customers to try out on their own, in the wild, to do whatever
they might with it.

To do this, you have
to be willing to be more vulnerable. This is where trust comes in. We don't
want to let our customers down or to disappoint them. We're also aware that
the first impression is crucial because it can anchor our users' perceptions
and expectations in the future. These concerns are in direct conflict with the
goal of letting users into the inner chambers of our design process, allowing
them to co-design with us, and observe the work in progress as it comes
together.

In spite of the
discomfort of being exposed, we are learning to be more vulnerable. So far, we
have found that many people are willing to work with us from this early stage. They are prepared to put up with the bugs and crashes in return for being able to help guide and influence the
functionality so that it gives them what they need. And through this process we are
building trust.

By partnering with our
customers in a deeper way, we are building more human relationships. For
example, we introduce the council participants to the relevant development team at Autodesk. We share names and pictures of
people, have webinars and one-on-one phone calls. This helps us move beyond
the perception of being the big company Autodesk, to just being people who are
trying hard and doing our best, who will acknowledge if we make the wrong
assumption about a feature or leave out something that is important.

We want to build
something that users are thrilled to get their hands on and that will amplify
their abilities to do even more amazing work. We are still in the early stages
of learning with Customer Councils, but we are getting glimpses that we can get
closer to our goal by letting users into the development process earlier.

Interested in participating in a customer council or other AutoCAD research? Tell us a little about yourself and we will contact you with upcoming opportunities!